Many show business veterans wondered why Rivers wasn’t chosen for the high-profile gigs routinely given to less famous men with fewer credentials, as when Ricky Gervais hosted the Golden Globe Awards.
“I thought she should have hosted the Oscars,” said one entertainment industry journalist. “She was dismissed in a way that was insulting to every woman who wanted to be a comedy host. Let’s have Jon Stewart, Billy Crystal, David Letterman—everyone but Joan. It’s as if she wasn’t being taken seriously, even though she was the smartest and funniest person in the room.”
“I’m never going to win anything,” Rivers told the Daily Beast shortly before she died. “I’m too abrasive…But I think comics should be on the outside. If you’re on the inside, it’s over.”
And yet all she’d ever wanted was not to be an outsider, so it rankled. “When they talk about the top women comedians, I’m never mentioned,” she said. “Whenever they talk about women directors of successful films, I’m not mentioned. When they talk about any category, I’m not in it. So I think that’s the problem: they don’t know where to put me, so I’m nowhere. Maybe when I die they’ll say it. The only time the critics were ever nice to me was after I was fired from Fox—after they had destroyed me. Then they came out and they said, ‘She was the first to do this! She was the top woman in her field!’ Only when they thought I was dead in my career did they give me the accolades. So I said to Melissa, ‘When they cremate me, throw in all the obituaries, because they’re going to be glowing.’”
In truth, however, Rivers’s self-image as a wallflower sometimes prevented her from recognizing what a big star others considered her to be. “Hal Prince throws a famous Christmas party every year, with a lot of famous people,” said David Dangle, referring to the renowned Broadway director. “It’s all the world she loved. She said to me, ‘I don’t get invited to that party. I go as the guest of Arnold Stiefel, Rod Stewart’s manager.’ It was the highlight of her year, the most fun she would have, because it was famous Broadway people in Hal’s gorgeous town house. She carved out her schedule around Hal’s party. I was talking to Charles Busch, and I said that Joan never knew if she would be invited. He said, ‘Are you kidding? She was the star of that party! Everyone in the room would drop dead when she walked in—it was like, “Oh my God, Joan Rivers is here!”’”
Rivers seemed oblivious to such reactions. “At one point she whispered to me, ‘Can you believe we’re here?’” Busch said. “She was by far the most famous person in the room.”
But Rivers couldn’t seem to register that fact. “They could have cared less if I came to that party,” said Arnold Stiefel. “Joan Rivers was an event, but in her crazy head, she didn’t know that. She wasn’t able to process how beloved and how successful she was. She was always fighting the fight to be loved, and she just didn’t understand the huge extent to which she had succeeded.”
Although her insecurities never abated, Rivers recognized how much she had to celebrate during the last years of her life. “I think she felt extremely blessed in every way,” said Robert Higdon. “I think she was happy, and I think she was very proud of her achievements.”
Her success was doubly pleasurable because it was so hard-won. “One time we were on the boat off St. Barts, and we took a tender in, and the first person we ran into was Barry Diller,” Pete Hathaway recalled. “This was before he built his big boat, and it absolutely thrilled Joan to see that her boat was bigger than his. She had risen from the ashes, and she was a big success. It still stuck in her craw about losing the Fox show, but she was the biggest survivor of all time.”
No matter how great her success, Rivers kept working. “That’s what gave her pleasure; that’s who she was,” said Margie Stern. “It was never about the money. Working was what turned her on and energized her.”
But she was driven by fear as well. “She was never convinced that things were okay, because if things are so great today, ‘Oh my God, what’s going to happen tomorrow?’” said David Bernstein. “Things were taken away from her unjustly; she lost a show, she lost a husband, for a few years she lost the love of her daughter, her career was going bad—and she wouldn’t let herself forget it, because if you forget about the bad times, the good times won’t have the same meaning. She created her own paranoia. She couldn’t help worrying that her career could crash tomorrow. She has been knocked down from that same perch so many times that whatever happens, she’s determined she’s going to get back on. It wasn’t to convince other people; it was to convince herself.”
Rivers’s fellow performers also discerned a deeper need. “I think she had that compulsion to hear laughter,” Larry King said. “No one gets a bigger kick in any form of show business than comedy. You can’t force it, but when you hear laughter, there’s no bigger high. You are creating laughter in others, and it’s a giant ‘I love you!’ They’re saying, ‘You have made me feel good!’”
But no matter how many audiences she seduced, Rivers kept trying to generate new projects in television and theater. “She was desperate to come back on Broadway,” said Margie Stern.
Rivers had high hopes for a show called Joan Rivers: A Work in Progress by a Life in Progress, which she performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 2008. To help her develop material for the show, Charles Busch did a series of interviews with her, and he was astonished by the flood of emotion his questions triggered.
“She held nothing back,” he said. “It was tears and rage. She talked about Johnny Carson, and it was like he had tentacles reaching out, trying to destroy her. She was bitter, because he was trying to destroy her career—total, sobbing rage. When she talked about Edgar, there was love, guilt, rage—it was all very alive in her. She was sobbing about her mother’s death, and the fact that her father literally wanted to have her committed when he found out she wanted to be a stand-up comic. She talked about her sister, about how Barbara was the beautiful one and the smart one.”
The show Rivers put together was set in her dressing room on the night of the Academy Awards, and its premise revolved around her being elbowed out of her Oscar night red-carpet broadcasting job. Like Sally Marr, it seemed a glorified one-woman vehicle, despite a couple of minor supporting characters. The focus was on Rivers’s trials and tribulations, from her husband’s suicide to “her own suffering at the whims of sexist, ageist TV bosses,” as Brian Logan wrote in The Guardian. “She tells us, climactically, that ‘performing for you is my life, and no one has the right to take it away from me.’”
Most critics found the show unappealing. “To accuse Joan Rivers of ego is like complaining that the Pope is Catholic,” Logan wrote. “It comes with the territory. But even by her standards, this is a remarkable exercise in self-mythologizing.”
As with Sally Marr, Rivers had veered too far into her grievances, so the dominant tone struck audiences as one of anger. “I think she didn’t understand why people didn’t like it. She felt she was being open about her entire career, but so much of it was so bitter it ceased to be funny,” said the theater writer David Finkle. “So much of it was her spewing bitterness about Johnny Carson. It was extremely bitter, and it wasn’t good. She should have let it go.”
With Rivers, the rancor always lurked just beneath the surface. “She was the most loyal person ever, and she was a warm person, but she was also a fucking angry person,” said Andy Cohen. “She had to fight for everything she had. She had balls. But I saw her anger, and I would never want to get in her way.”
The negative emotions were always tempered with a touching belief in the possibility of new opportunities. “She never gave up the bitterness, but she also never gave up the hope,” said Sue Cameron. “She was never too proud to try.”
But the anger continued to fuel her humor. A month before her death, Rivers made her last appearance on Watch What Happens: Live. “There was a New York Housewives reunion airing that night, and I asked her to do a little Fashion Police lead-in,” said Cohen, the executive producer of the Real
Housewives franchise as well as host of Watch What Happens: Live. “Joan was not a fan of Real Housewives, and she said, ‘I’m going to say they all look like filthy whores.’”
Older people often lose interest in a rapidly evolving culture, but Rivers’s passion for what was new and different never flagged. “She was always the first one to know about whatever the latest fashion or cosmetic treatment was,” Blaine Trump said. “She was really interested in popular culture, in whatever the next thing was, moving forward. She just didn’t live in the past.”
As always, most of her cultural references were rude, as with her comments about a group of multicultural children on her Comedy Central roast: “Oh look—Brad and Angelina are having a garage sale!”
Rivers even understood that a performer who wanted a high profile had to keep up with the new social mores generated by changing technology. “She understood the Twitter world, where it had to be rapid-fire,” said Mark Simone.
Shortly before Rivers died, George Hamilton did a commercial for CVS with her. “They paid us very well, but they said, ‘Joan is getting slightly more than you. She had higher social media hits than you,’” Hamilton recalled. “That was my first moment of realizing that she’d already tapped into that.”
But it was her cutting-edge humor that always surprised people the most. The last time David Bernstein saw Rivers perform, he was astonished. “She was doing a bit about how everyone’s checking their cell phones all the time,” he said. “She was lying on the floor, her legs spread, simulating intercourse as a woman who is checking her phone while she’s having sex.”
Rivers also continued to amaze people with her lightning-quick reflexes. “She could ad-lib about anything,” said Mark Simone. “Believe it or not, some of the greatest comics can’t ad-lib at all. She was very smart, and she did her own radio talk show for five years. She could ad-lib for three hours a day.”
Josh Ostrovsky, a social media personality and entertainer who calls himself the Fat Jew, was introduced to Rivers the year before she died when he and a friend named Ben Lyons ran into her in the Sirius radio building.
“When we saw her, Ben said, ‘I’m really excited for you to meet her, because I feel as if you’re aspiring to be Joan Rivers—you’re a foulmouthed Jew who loves self-deprecation,’” recalled Ostrovsky, a plus-size model who is known for such comments as his claim that his penis is the size of a rock shrimp. “I was wearing boat shoes and a short kimono with a loud paisley print that belonged to my grandmother. At the time, I had a very large, billowing Jewish Afro. But too many other people were growing Jewish ’fros, so I cut off the sides. I had cut off half of it, so it was almost like a Jewish flattop. It was definitely a stupid haircut. Ben introduced us, and Joan said, ‘Oh my God, look at your hair!’ I said, ‘Do you like it?’ She said, ‘I guess you wanted to look like my vagina in the 1970s.’ I said, ‘Yes! That’s exactly what I was going for!’”
Ostrovsky was dazzled by Rivers. “Lots of comedians can make fun of someone masterfully if they have some time to come up with something really witty and cutting, but to be able to do it right there on the spot, it honestly was awesome,” he said. “I’m a guy who is considered edgy, and in seven seconds this woman was able to put me back on my heels. It’s an art to be really funny and not give a fuck. She knew that her charm and her ability to say something cutting and gross would be lovable. It was like having a drunk Jewish aunt who would say whatever she fucking pleases, but your aunt would just say something mean. It’s such a thin line between being mean and having the person hate you, or being mean and having the person fall in love with you. Comedy ages so poorly, and things become not hot in fifteen seconds. But the fact that Joan Rivers was able to adapt and change and stay relevant for forty years and be considered raunchy and edgy—that’s insane.”
If anything, Rivers actually grew bolder with age instead of toning anything down. “I would say, ‘You know you’re getting worse!’” Kathy Griffin said. “The last time I saw Joan live, I kept thinking, ‘You can’t say those things!’ She was telling everybody to get out of there—‘All the Asian women, go! You’re stealing our men! All the lesbians—go!’ No matter what she said, the audiences loved it. When I do a show and the audience gasps, I say, ‘Puh-leeze—if you saw Joan Rivers, I’d be a nun novitiate in comparison.’ That kind of laugh-with-a-gasp is unique to someone who is breaking ground.”
If Rivers’s riffs often shocked people, her fellow comedians were thrilled. “I believe it’s really emancipating to see a humorist get up and say things that are ‘wrong,’ and it’s emancipating for the audience to see an eighty-one-year-old woman stand onstage and say whatever the fuck makes you laugh,” Griffin said. “It was always about getting the laugh, and as Joan got older, she gave less of a fuck. And there’s nothing more fun than watching someone who doesn’t give a fuck. As Gloria Steinem wrote on her Facebook, these younger women have opportunities that Joan couldn’t even have imagined. They can’t imagine Joan’s battles.”
Having survived what she did, Rivers felt there was little more to fear. “I’ve learned, when you get older, who cares?” she said. “I don’t mince words; I don’t hold back. What are you gonna do to me? Fire me? It’s been done. Threaten to commit suicide? Done. Take away my show? Done! Not invite me to the Vanity Fair party? I’ve never been invited!”
According to Griffin, Rivers’s general attitude alternated between complaint and gratitude. “Our conversations were half ruthless bitching—just vicious!—and half ‘Aren’t we lucky!’” Griffin said.
“She knew she was very fortunate,” said Martyn Fletcher, Rivers’s London hairdresser and friend. “We had the most amazing experiences together, and we both knew we were having amazing experiences. She never took it for granted. She got it that she was having a great life. She would say, ‘Are we not having the best time?’”
But in public, Rivers preferred to keep such positive emotions a secret. “She liked the image of being irascible, bitchy, arrogant,” said David Bernstein. “She was so protective of her image that anytime she did something benevolent, she wanted it hidden. I honestly believe she was a happy person, and I think a lot of the happiness stemmed from giving. I feel like she’d be mad at me for saying this, because it conflicts with the image, but she was a very benevolent individual.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Final Mountain:
Gathering Shadows
Rivers never stopped working, but the period when she was being filmed for Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work represented a relative lull before the success of Fashion Police goosed up her public profile one last time. She was still haunted by any sign that her career was dwindling, and the most poignant scene in the documentary is one in which Rivers talks about that fear.
“Her greatest nightmare was that she didn’t have anything in her book,” said Blaine Trump.
When her schedule got sparse, her resentment of younger competitors flared up again. “The older you get, the harder it is for you to hang on,” Rivers told Larry King in one interview. “They’re waiting for you to fall.”
And by “they,” she usually meant Kathy Griffin. The documentary showed Rivers “reminiscing about the ‘good years,’ when her schedule was full,” Jackie Oshry wrote in the Huffington Post. “Jokingly, she attributes this slump to none other than Kathy Griffin. ‘Not good…not good. We have no Vegas, no giant club dates—Kathy Griffin has taken all of those away.’ Minutes later, when trying to reach someone on the phone, she jokes again, ‘I’d get through faster if I was Kathy Griffin.’”
In 2009, Comedy Central presented a brutal roast of Rivers and chose Griffin as its host. She introduced the honoree to the audience as “a legendary bitch—Joan fucking Rivers!”
Grinning at the audience, Griffin said they could only hope that Rivers would have “half as big a nervous breakdown as she did on Celebrity Apprentice. And she still won! You know why? Because Joan has got the biggest, maybe hairiest balls in this room!
”
She was equally scathing about Rivers’s appearance. “Joan Rivers is not an Orthodox Jew, but men still fuck her through a sheet so they don’t have to look at that face,” Griffin said. “Let’s do what everyone is afraid to do—take a close look at Joan Rivers!”
Rivers absorbed such barbs, smiling through what often looked like gritted teeth. In her closing remarks, she said, “Kathy Griffin, you know what you are, darling? You are a thief! Yes. You stole my act, you stole my gays, and you stole the face of the Burger King. I am not happy with this.”
While such insults come with the territory, the roast clearly rankled. “They said such mean, disgusting [things],” Rivers said later. “Oh sure, turn against the Queen…It’s like Marie Antoinette. Yeah, like you’re gonna do better with Kathy Griffin. Fuck you…When she lasts forty-five years, then go stand on my grave.”
Rivers could dish it out, but she didn’t like taking it, and she usually avoided putting herself in that position. “We never roasted her; we asked her all the time, but she always turned us down,” reported Barry Dougherty, the Friars Club’s press and public relations officer. “Comedy Central did, but Comedy Central pays, and we don’t.”
Dougherty thought Rivers was particularly sensitive about people making fun of her face. “She was tired of plastic surgery being the only subject they would come up with,” he said.
She was also tired of feeling constantly threatened by hungry rivals who were just waiting for her to falter. “It wasn’t that Joan disliked Kathy; she could just see the ambition dripping from Kathy’s mouth,” said Sue Cameron.
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